Evidently he's well known in the UK because of TV work. The audience at the live announcement on BBC America stood up and cheered when he walked on to the stage. (Did anyone else watch that besides Austin?) Capaldi is 55, the same age as William Hartnell when he played the first Doctor. Capaldi has played some small roles in movies, like a World Health Organization doctor (a WHO doctor, ha!) in World War Z. He looks kind of familiar to me, but I can't say from where. Did you know Doctor Who has been around for half a century? Started in 1963.

I watched the announcement, replayed this afternoon. Capaldi has a rather lightweight voice to be playing a character everyone listens to. But he was just speaking as himself on the announcement show, not acting. We'll see.

You know, they say your favorite Doctor is the first one you watched. That may be true in my case, as Tom Baker will always be THE Doctor to me. Matt Smith is a close second, but Baker really understood the whimsy of the role, with his bug eyes and mass of curly hair and the impossibly long scarf that he never once tripped over (we'll leave the shtik to Sylvester McCoy). I liked his companions too, especially Leela, who must surely be an ancestress of Fiona in Burn Notice ("Let's kill them!"). But no matter who's playing the Doctor, this show is always fun.

Peter Capaldi is best-known for playing a foul-mouthed spin doctor in a very entertaining BBC series called The Thick of It. There was also a 2009 film spin-off called In the Loop (with a cameo role for James Gandolfini) - see the IMDB. More recently, he was on stage in the West End playing the Alec Guinness role in The Lady-Killers.

The local public TV station had a manager who hated Doctor Who, and refused to run it. He did run 13 weeks' worth once, maybe 20 years ago--I remember that it seemed to have been three half hour programs condensed into two half hours--and the production values were nearly zero. The actor wore what seemed to have been a ten foot long scarf, but I have no idea who he was.